How Sydney Sweeney became her generation’s most business-savvy bombshell
It goes without saying that Sydney Sweeney is a highly telegenic actor, but that’s been just as much of a blessing as it has been a curse for many others in her position who were immediately singled out for their looks instead of their acting abilities.
History is littered with performers who were anointed as the next big thing but failed to realise that potential, and there are just as many cases of stars who exploded onto the scene only to fizzle out in an instant, never mind the ones who struggled to escape from the shackles of typecasting placed on them very early in their careers.
Sweeney knows that, and she’s used it to her advantage by taking control of her own destiny. Offers were no doubt flooding in following her breakthrough Primetime Emmy-nominated performances in HBO’s The White Lotus and Euphoria, but now that she’s a known commodity, the actor has instead decided that the best way to achieve longevity is to shape that trajectory herself.
Realistically, actors born in 1997 shouldn’t be in the position to dictate their direction, but Sweeney is. Not every project is guaranteed to be a winner, but even when she starred in a truly wretched work of cinema, she was intelligent and savvy enough to deflect the blame away from one shitty film in favour of reappraising it as an important moment in her career that gave her the springboard to do the work she wanted to do.
The turd in question was Madame Web, a superheroic dumpster fire that couldn’t be put out. Sweeney may have been the second-billed name in the cast, but she wasn’t the star. As a result, she managed to emerge unscathed from the smouldering wreckage of another box office disaster from Sony’s ongoing attempts to carve out a slice of the lucrative Marvel pie, which led her straight into bigger and better things.
For Sweeney, she “was just hired as an actress in it”, which is fair enough. Passion projects don’t always tend to pay the bills, but she nonetheless ended up as the only person involved in Madame Web to gain anything from the experience. It was an awful motion picture, but regardless of how wretched it was, it became an essential building block in her ongoing ascent up the ladder.
Referring to Madame Web as a “strategic business decision”, Sweeney ingratiated herself with the top brass at Sony, which allowed her to pitch and sell the decision-makers Anyone But You, which led to her being anointed as the star and executive producer of the highest-grossing live-action William Shakespeare adaptation ever made.
Her next outing after that came in the horror film Immaculate, which she’d originally auditioned for in 2014. The initial iteration of the project may have fallen apart, but Sweeney ended up buying the rights to the film so that it could be made, pulling double duty as both star and producer. Chalking another one up in the win column, it ended its theatrical run as distributor Neon’s highest-grossing release ever until it was surpassed by Longlegs.
Listening to the noise claiming that she’d yet to prove herself as a serious dramatic actor outside of the Euphoria bubble, Sweeney chased down the part of Reality Winner in Tina Satter’s HBO feature Reality and won rave reviews for a performance that was the opposite of glamourous. Again, it was a strategic move, but it was yet another one that paid off handsomely.
Obviously, she’s a million miles away from being the first star to walk this particular path, with actors doubling up as producers having been the norm for decades. However, how many women still in their 20s are doing it and finding similar levels of success? Few, if any, but Sweeney is proof enough that the reward is well worth the risk of betting big on herself.
